Modelling and texturing roads

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I decided to write my first tutorial. It will basically teach you how to make roads and texture them. Many people besides myself were looking for decent ways to do this. I wrote one.

You only need a 3d modeliing program (I use 3ds Max 5), this pic , and this texture. and the texture

Part I

Step 1: What do you want your road to look like? Will it be a bridge? Will it be two sided? Will it be part of a highway? All these question you must ask yourself before making a road. In this tutorial we will make a part of a normal road. Make a top down view of the road. Like this:

Save this picture to the hard drive. Somewhere easy to go. This picture is only for a vague reference, the object will differ slightly. We will make a medium poly road so you it looks good and you admire it afterwards. The road has a curve in it so we can learn to model and texture it correctly.

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Activate the Snap Toggle and select and right click on it. On the window that appears, select Vertex and Grid Points. Now in the front viewport, zoom in until the viewport has a height of 15 squares and a length of 20. Then, select Shapes from the menu and Line. Check Corner on both and draw the following shape:

Go to the top viewport. Now, in Max press Alt+B to bring up the the Viewport Background menu. Press Files... and find the destination where you saved the picture. Press open and below select Match Bitmap and Lock Zoom /Pan. The picture will show up in the top viewport.

You select the shape in the top viewport and move it to the bottom of the picture, where the road starts. Position it as accurately as possible. You might need to scale it down so it fits exactly so use the Select and Uniform scale tool. You make it smaller and then reposition it so it fits:

Now right click on the shape in another viewport and select convert to poly from the convert to: menu . We want the poly to be facing to the rest of the road so we might have to select it and rotate it 90 degrees. To do that, use the Select and Rotate button on the toolbar:You might not need to do this!

Select the shape and click the Absolute Mode Transform Type-In once.Now in the Z axis, type in 180:

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Now hit the little square next to the extrude button. The poly will have changed somewhat. In the menu that appears, set the extrusion type to Group and the Height to 200. Press OK. The poly will know look like a part of a road:

Now extrude again. This time only by 15 units. As this will be part of the curve we are going to use lots of detail so when it is textured it will look nice.

Select and Rotate is the button you should click now. Select the poly at the end and rotate it 6,5 points. It should look like this:

Now repeat the same thing. Extrude poly by 15 and then rotate it Z: -6,5 (or 6,5). After you do it about 12 times, it shoud look like this:

Now to make the road curve the other way, we do the opposite. Extrude once and don't rotate. Extrude another time and rotate Z: 6,5 (or -6,5). After about 14 times it will look like this:

(as you see, it doesn't go accordingly to the reference pic, as the pic was just used as a vague ruler )

Now extrude the poly about 190 units and rotate by Z: -0,95. Switch to border sub level. Select the last poly at the end of the model and press Cap. That should cover that with a surface too.

The modelling part of this tutorial has finished, we will now move on to texturing.

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Open the Material Editor. Select a empty slot and set Glossiness to 0 and click the Lock Colors button which is between Diffuse and Specular. Then, click on the square next to Diffuse. A menu will show up. Select bitmap and navigate to the position where you saved the texture you downloaded. Now, drag the texture from the Material Editor to the object and click Show Map in Viewport. The texture will appear on the model, distorted of course but we are about to fix that.

Select the model. On the Modifier Tab/ Modifier List select Unwrap UVW. Now in the Unwrap UVW modifier stack select Face and then Edit:

A window will appear. There is where the texturing will take part. Bear with me.

The process:

If the window is maximized, restore it. Click Show Options... Set brightness to 100 and tiles to a number larger than 4. Now maximize.

In the Edit UVWs window select the entire model. Then, at the menu choose Mapping/ Normal Mapping and click OK. The weird heap of lines has become considerably more understandable. The top shape is the polies that are facing downwards and sideways and the bottom shape represents the polies which face upwards and front-back. We will start with the bottom shape so you see results quickly and are encouraged to continue .

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That is so we have room to spread out the second shape. Now, from the Tools menu, select Sketch Vertices and from the Align to drop down menu select Line. Then, click OK. Now the target is to select all the vertices at the top row of the bottom shape. Only the top line. So click and hold the mouse button down. Slowly guide the cursor over the vertices one by one. If you miss one you have to start over again as it will screw it up. The best way to do this is to zoom in a bit and take a rest when you feel wobbly. It might be annoying but you'll get there eventually.

When you select them all, leave the mouse button. It will turn into a pen. Now, above the top row, where the texture supposedly ends draw a straight line:

Don't worry if the first and last lines you intersect with other lines. That is because of the poly at the beggining and the end of the road.

Now you have to do the same with the three reamining rows of vertices. The second row goes right above the white line, the third row right below the white line after the road and the fourth line should be positioned at the end of the texture. Like this:

Now render the scene from the perspective viewport. It looks cool but the end an the beggining of the road looks stretched. That happened because they are big polygons and thus need more of the texture to appear correctly. So, select this poly:

Now click the Edit button to open up the Edit UVWs window. Move these vertices a bit to the right:

And do the same to the other poly at the end of the road, but this time move the vertices to the left. If you want you can now render your scene. The stretched textures have gone and the road looks good. Time to texture the bottom and the inside of the walls that surround the road.

Open the Edit UVWs window. Select all the top shape and move it so the largest part of it is on the cement part of the texture. Like this:

Now as it is the bottom part, we don't need to be so careful while texturing. I could easily tell you to just tuck all the vertices wihin the cement part and be done with it. However, we will make it look nice.

Now what you do is this. You select the vertices row, by row, rotate them so they are straight and place them on the grey part. Just repeat thet until it is finished. Like this:

Until you get here:

Be careful when selecting the vertices. Allways draw a box around them as there are on top of each other and you need to select both of them.

When you finish spreading out the verts, pull out the ones that belong to the first and last big poly at the bottom of the road. This is done so the textures aren't stretched.